There is a particular kind of knowledge that doesn't live in a book. It lives in hands, and is passed from one person to another across kitchen tables, in workshops and across generations. Someone shows you how to work the clay, mend the cloth, gather the flowers or shape the wood. You have a go, get it wrong, try again, and eventually your hands begin to understand something your head didn't quite know how to learn.
There's a Welsh word, cynefin, which is often used to describe a sense of belonging to a particular place — something deeper than simply knowing where you are. It is about being rooted in your surroundings and understanding your relationship with them. Craft can be one way into that understanding.
For generations here in Wales, making has been tied to the landscape. Wool, wood, clay, stone, plants and food have all shaped the way people live here, with materials determined in part by what was available locally and skills developing around the particular character of each place. These traditions were not necessarily thought of as heritage at the time. They were simply useful knowledge, passed down because somebody needed to know how to do something.
It's only when those skills begin to disappear that we realise how much they contain. We can talk about heritage as though it is something fragile, to be put behind glass, but the most interesting traditions have never been static. They survive because people continue to use them, adapt them and pass them on.
Keeping Welsh craft alive, then, can't simply mean preserving the past exactly as it was. It means giving people reasons to make it part of their lives now. Especially today, when we work through screens, communicate through devices and consume things that arrive already finished. Craft reconnects effort with outcome. You can feel the weight of the clay, the texture of the wool, the shape of the wood. You can see exactly where your hands have been.
And so, it's little wonder that craft retreats or “skillcations”, have become one of the biggest travel trends of the year. There's something important about sitting down and learning this craft from somebody who has spent years developing a particular skill. You don't need to arrive knowing anything, and you certainly don't need to produce something perfect. You simply have to be willing to try.
I have long been an admirer of stained-glass windows and of Flora Jamieson’s work — she teaches how to paint a traditional stained-glass quarry (a decorative square of glass often seen in Victorian stained glass windows). Erin MacAirt, an artist and printmaker living in West Wales, is another favourite. Her work blurs the line between visible and invisible worlds, like weaving straw and corn dollies. It used to be customary to craft a corn dolly from the last sheaf of the harvest; it was then kept inside through the winter, often in the kitchen, to bring good luck and fortune the following year.
The skills of craft, combined with a warm atmosphere and the space to dream, are what makes each of these retreats so special. People arrive with different experiences and interests, and making offers an easy way into conversation. Someone demonstrates a technique; someone else asks a question; a story emerges. There's no particular pressure for the exchange to become anything more than an enjoyable afternoon spent learning something new, and nobody judges your work.
And if all goes to plan, you'll leave not only with an understanding of a craft, but feeling a sense of cynefin, of belonging, as well.
